Are you curious about SPAM?!

The present article was sent to me by our TIC teacher, in order to teach us how on Earth SPAM appeared in our lives... Quite amusing to play with different kinds of fonts, formats and images... Help yourself!!!!!!!

Karina Fabiola Rocchi Turrillo

What is spam?

If you use email, you´ll have encountered spam. But do you know where the term comes from, and why it´s used to refer to unwanted email?

“Spam” is an acronym derived from the words “spiced” and “ham”. In 1937, the Hormel Foods Corporation (USA) started apelling minced sausage made from out-of-date meat. The Americans refused to buy this unappetizing product. To avoid financial losses the owner of the company, Mr. Hormel, launched a massive advertising campaign which resulted in a contract to provide tinned meat products to the Army and Navy. In 1937, Hormel Foods began to supply its products to American and allied troops. After World War 2, with Britain in the grups of an economic crisis, spam was one of the few meat products that wasn´t rationed and hence was widely available. George Orwell, in his book “1984”m descrubed soan as “pink meat pieces”, which gave a new meaning to the word “spam” - something disgusting but inevitable.

In December 1970 the BBC television comedy series Monty Pyton´s Flying Circus showed a sketch set in a café where nearly every item on the menu included spam – the tinned meat product. As the wairter recited the SPAM-fillled menu, a chorus of Viking patrons drowned out all other conversation with a song repeating “SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM... lovely SPAM, wonderful SPAM”, hence “SPAMming” the dialogue.  Since then spam has been associated with unwanted, obstrusive, excessive information which suppresses required messages.

In 1993 the term “spam” was first introduced with reference to unsolicited or undesired bulk electronic messages. Richard Dephew, administrator of the world.wide distributed Internet discussion system Usenet, wrote a program which mistakenly caused the release of dozens of recursive messages onto the news.admin.policy newsgroup. The recipients immediately found an appropriate name for these obstrusive messages – spam.

On April 12 1994, a husband-and-wife firm of lawyers, Canter & Spiegel, posted the first massive spam mailing. The compañy´s programmer employed Usenet to advertise the services offered by Canter & Siegel, thus giving a atart to commercial spam.

Today the word “spam” is widely used in Email terminology, though Hormelo tinned meat products are still on sale in the USA.

Types of spam
Spam comes in many different varieties, ranging from advertising of legitimate goods and services to political propaganda to Internet scams. Spam worldwide tends to advertise a certain range of goods and services irrespective of language and geography.

Spammers constantly extend the range of their offers and are always searching for new ways of attracting unwary users. The list of spam categories is growing. However, when averaged out over the course of the year, 50% of spam falls into the following categories:
1. Adult content                                                    4. Personal finance
2. Health                                                               5. Education and training
3. IT

How to reduce spam
Spam isn´t only a nuisance, but can pose a threat to your computer or your data. For simple, practical guidelines on how you can reduce the amount of spam you receive, read here

Number of words in the text: 518                                                               April 27th, 2010

Number of words in the text: 518 April 27^th, 2010